There are many situations in which businesses request information from suppliers, customers and potential customers, for example to obtain contact details, to understand customer requirements to enable targeted marketing, or to obtain feedback on existing services so that improvements can be made. Electronic forms may be completed and sent on-line to a business when ordering products and services, or to provide requested information. There are problems associated with the use of electronic forms, and each of the other known ways of obtaining requested information also has problems.
A service provider or product manufacturer may publish an order form on their Web site to enable customers to order products and services. Hyperlinks to the order form may be provided within other Web pages, or the URL for accessing the form may be published in a magazine or newspaper. A potential customer can navigate to the location of the form on the Web and then fill in the form on-line or download the form over the network for later completion. A reliable network connection is necessary for accessing and submitting on-line forms. Users of bandwidth-limited wireless devices are often reluctant to spend time navigating through a Web site to find the appropriate form, and so any requirement to locate a form via a network reduces the number of people completing the form. If storage space is limited, the device user may also be reluctant to save multiple forms onto their device. Any requirement for users to manually enter long URLs introduces the likelihood of errors.
Another option is for a corporation to transmit a form to their customers' mobile telephones or other devices when requesting information. A number of projects have proposed specifications and languages for Web-based forms (such as the W3C's XForms, the Extensible Forms Description Language (XFDL), the Form Automation Markup Language (FAML) and Wireless Markup Language (WML) forms) and some are compatible with low-bandwidth devices with a small user interface. Forms have the advantage of controlling the format in which data is entered and hence limiting the scope for user errors when entering data.
However, a broadcast solution has the problem that the form may be received correctly only by a subset of the target audience (such as, in the case of WML, users of WAP-compliant telephones that are currently switched on and accessible via the network). Even if correctly received, the recipients may still choose not to save the forms onto their devices, for example because the recipient has no interest in the form at the time they receive it, and possibly also because of concerns about wasting storage or unwillingness to incur the costs and delays of communicating with a WAP server. If a form is imposed on a mobile device user at a time when it is not convenient to complete the form, there is a high likelihood that the form will be deleted. There is a need for data collection methods which are very convenient for end users to increase the proportion of end users willing to participate.
Some corporations have attempted to collect information from potential customers via Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. SMS messaging has the advantages of convenience and low cost, and the possibility of asynchronous message delivery by telecommunication network providers gives scalability and a degree of reliability of communications. A corporation running a competition or advertisement may invite competitors to submit entries by text messaging for these reasons, or a corporation may wish to target advertisements at young people (who often use text messaging extensively). For example, television broadcasting corporations sometimes invite viewers to use SMS messaging to vote on the outcome of a program, hoping to boost ratings by encouraging a sense of audience participation.
However, errors often arise because text messaging users fail to comply with the data format requirements of the data requester. A corporation may require responses from its customers in a particular format to enable accurate automated addition of responses to a database, and so the corporation may provide format instructions. For example, spaces between a customer's answers and commas between sections of the customer's address may be treated as delimiters within a transmitted data string that are used to control how the information within a response is entered into the corporation's database. A great many users fail to follow the instructions correctly and either enter their information incorrectly or give up because of the effort involved. These issues, and the limited screen size of many mobile devices, mean that the information requester may not solve the problem by publishing detailed instructions.
Let us assume that a corporation requires address details to be entered in a format such as ‘number street name’, ‘district’, ‘city’, ‘postcode’ (or zip code), ‘country’, to enable the information to be automatically entered into the correct database fields. However, the address “21 Belvue Road, Chariton, Southampton, SO19 3YT, UK” is entered by a user as “21, Belvue Road, Chariton, Southampton SO19 3YT, UK”. In the absence of address validation and automatic correction, the address may be interpreted as follows:
‘number and street name’ = ‘21’‘district’ = ‘Belvue Road’‘city’ = ‘Charlton’‘postcode’ = ERROR‘country’ = ‘UK’
The example shows how minor errors in data entry can result in database errors or input data being rejected as invalid. In this example, the ERROR message appears if ‘Southampton SO19 3YT’ is recognized as an invalid post code but is not automatically corrected. This example is representative of a very common problem for corporations wishing to obtain information via text messaging. The combination of formatting errors and users' reluctance to invest much time and effort typically results in a much smaller number of valid responses than the data-requesting corporation hoped for.